Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water, the judges in Washington took another big chomp out of the Affordable Care Act. No, not the Supreme Court -- this time it was the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In a 2-1 panel decision on partisan lines, the appeals court ruled that the tax subsidies for insurance coverage purchased from federal exchanges are illegal. The effect of the decision is to drastically undercut Obamacare by enabling all 36 states that don’t have their own exchanges to exempt millions of people from the individual mandate that they buy insurance. Meanwhile, across the Potomac River, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled the opposite way.

…Fleming’s case is one of many that are now under review at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office since District Attorney Kenneth Thompson took charge last January. Eight have already been exonerated out of scores of potentially wrongful convictions. Under Thompson’s direction, the old Conviction Integrity Unit has expanded to become the Conviction Review Unit. The objective of the new unit is simple: to bring the innocent to justice and restore faith in the legal system…Thompson has brought in Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard law professor, as a consultant on the design and operation of the new unit. As both a professor and attorney, Sullivan has real-world experience and a sophisticated eye for the legal process.

Last month, as you’ve probably heard, a closely divided Supreme Court ruled that corporations with religious owners cannot be required to pay for insurance coverage of contraception. The so-called Hobby Lobby decision, named for the chain of craft stores that brought the case, has been both praised and condemned for expanding religious rights and constraining Obamacare. But beneath the political implications, the ruling has significant economic undertones. It expands the right of corporations to be treated like people, part of a trend that may be contributing to the rise of economic inequality…Minority shareholders have little power to influence the choices that corporations make. Benjamin I. Sachs, a law professor at Harvard University, notes that while federal law lets union members prevent the use of their dues for political purposes, shareholders do not have similar rights. “If we’re going to say that collectives have speech rights, then we should treat unions and corporations the same,” Sachs told me.

The rush is on for big U.S. companies to lower their tax bills. They do it by merging with foreign companies in countries with lower rates and officially moving their home base. The strategy is called "inversion," and it's legal. But is it un-patriotic? …The trend of U.S. companies moving abroad is more a testament to, among other things, "the importance of non-U.S. markets for U.S. firms," said Mihir Desai, a Harvard professor of finance and law. "Rather than questioning the loyalties of executives it is critical to understand these underlying ... forces."

An op-ed by Cass. R. Sunstein. While Representative Paul Ryan’s new anti-poverty plan has provoked significant discussion, little attention has been given to his ideas for regulatory reform. Those ideas deserve separate analysis and also considerable credit. They point in helpful directions, and they suggest the possibility of bipartisan cooperation on some important questions.

Millions of Americans are not entitled to government health insurance subsidies under Obamacare because of the way the law is written, a divided three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday…Court rules allow any active member of the appeals court to vote for an en banc hearing, according to I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School. “There is nothing in the rules that say that people who were confirmed after the decision was taken up but before it was issued do not get to sit, so I imagine it means the now-Democrat stacked group will vote for en banc rehearing,” he said.

Pay phones, often thought of as things of the past, may see new life as Google is considering a plan to turn them into in Wi-Fi hotspots in New York City, according to published reports. Susan Crawford, a visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School and a former Obama administration technology adviser, told KCBS that she thinks it’s a great idea to use pay phones as 21st century infrastructure. “They’re magic in a sense. They’re connected to telecommunications lines and power. So you can imagine having pay phones all over the city that have been turned into Wi-Fi hotspots and also charging stations and information kiosks for tourists,” she said.

Secretary of State John Kerry presents his ceasefire plan to Israel and Hamas and it raises an important underlying legal question: are these war crimes? Professor Gabriella Blum, a former attorney for the Israel Defense Forces and a Professor of international humanitarian law at Harvard and Ronan Farrow debate.

President Barack Obama could act without congressional approval to limit a key incentive for U.S. corporations to move their tax domiciles abroad in so-called "inversion" deals, a former senior U.S. Treasury Department official said on Monday. By invoking a 1969 tax law, Obama could bypass congressional gridlock and restrict foreign tax-domiciled U.S companies from using inter-company loans and interest deductions to cut their U.S. tax bills, said Stephen Shay, former deputy assistant Treasury secretary for international tax affairs in the Obama administration. He also served as international tax counsel at Treasury from 1982 to 1987 in the Reagan administration.

As legislators across the country pass anti-heroin bills and health officials hold community summits, prosecutors in more states are pursuing homicide, and similarly serious charges, against those who provided the deadly doses…"It's a growing trend, but still a tactic used in a minority of states around the country," said Ron Sullivan, director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School.

We’re living in the era of the activist investor. Last year Carl Icahn and his ilk launched initiatives at 200 companies—including Microsoft, Dell, and Dow Chemical—aimed at sprucing up management, improving operations, selling off certain units, and ultimately improving the share price. That’s a sevenfold jump compared with a decade earlier, according to Harvard research, and the ranks of prominent megaphone-wielding investors seem only to be growing. That prompts an obvious question: When Icahn leaps, should you jump too? The short answer: Yes. Evidence shows that buying stocks after change-oriented campaigns are instigated can yield superior returns for several years…Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard Law School professor who also heads the university's Program on Corporate Governance, found similar initial gains.

By Margaret H. Marshall. During the long years that I was unable to return to South Africa, where I was born, raised, and lived for the first 25 years of my life, I could spend time with Nadine Gordimer only when she visited Boston. She often stayed with close friends of hers in their home on a quiet, leafy street, close to the center of Harvard. She seemed to thrive during those visits, tasting the freedom that we who are privileged to live here too often take for granted. It was a response I knew well: I had endured the offensive restrictions of apartheid, and breathed deeply on my few visits to the United States before I settled here.

Laurence Tribe discusses ACA rulings with Gretchen Carlson.

A three-judge panel at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Affordable Care Act cannot provide subsidies to millions enrolled under the federal health care exchange because the law, as written, does not allow it…Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe told the Financial Times that he would not "bet the family farm" on the law being vindicated on appeal. Tribe is a longstanding supporter of the Affordable Care Act. “It looks like the panel is quite divided over what to do with what might [have been] an inadvertent error in the legislation or might have been quite deliberate,” Tribe told the Financial Times. “But it’s very specific that only people that go onto a state exchange are eligible for the subsidies. And if that becomes the ultimate holding of the U.S. Supreme Court, where this is likely to end up — that’s going to have massive practical implications for the administrability of Obamacare.”

In a rare public exchange in June 2011, Jamie Dimon asked then Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke what the total economic costs of the year-old Dodd-Frank Act would be…As the regulatory reform law turns four on July 21, Dimon's question remains unanswered, despite being a recurring concern raised by the financial industry and many Republican lawmakers…"A cost-benefit analysis is an important element of decision-making," said Parkinson. "But as a practical matter, it's hard to quantify the benefits and it's hard to quantify the costs. Often the analysis doesn't provide as much insight as you'd like." Two papers by Jeffrey Gordon, a law professor at Columbia University and John Coates, a law and economics professor at Harvard University, also strongly support that claim.

A letter by Charles Fried. It would help if we called things by their true names. The car dealers who put false income data into loan applications for people living on Social Security, surreptitiously add on unexplained charges, and sometimes even forge signatures are thieves. The banks that — knowingly or with willed ignorance — buy and package these loans are receivers of stolen property. The investors who buy these packages for their high rates of return are like customers who shop for bargains from fences or the tailgates of trucks selling hijacked goods. The free market is great, but it depends on honesty. Why aren’t more of these people being prosecuted?

A Harvard student and graduate of West Springfield High School left Wednesday for a Birthright trip to Israel. This as the conflict with the Palestinians and concerns over airline safety grows. Becca Gauthier [’15] has her bags packed and heads to a train on her way to a flight to Israel. She will be flying El-Al Airlines, as a growing number of other carriers refuse to fly over the embattled air space of the Middle East.

Since the dawn of the Internet, email users have been haunted by the finality of hitting the “send” button. No more. What could be the foremost of all First World problems — the inability to retrieve or delete an ill-conceived email — is now a thing of the past for users of Pluto Mail, according to the Harvard law student who created it. “I’ve been annoyed with the fact that any email I send lasts forever, and I think Snapchat popularized the more-forgettable Internet, and I thought it would be great to bring it to email. It’s a very salient problem. I think everyone has had this ‘uh oh’ moment," said David Gobaud [`15], founder and CEO of Pluto Labs Inc. “Basically the Pluto service turns your emails into dynamic ones that you can maintain control over. I built a new email server that turns an email into a living document.”

em>An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe. The moment the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, it became a litigation magnet. The lawsuits threatening to derail it were initially dismissed as ridiculous but became deadly serious by the time Chief Justice John Roberts’s decisive fifth vote two years later barely upheld the law’s individual mandate, while the Court’s decisive 7-2 vote left the health law’s Medicaid expansion in tatters. …But while Boehner’s empty threat makes headlines, a far more serious threat could deliver the death blow that the law’s opponents have been seeking. This new round of litigation attacks the health insurance exchanges at the heart of Obamacare.

An op-ed by Benjamin Sachs and Catherine Fisk. Last week in Harris vs. Quinn, the U.S. Supreme Court put unions in a bind when it ruled that unionized home-care workers cannot be required to pay for the representation that unions are required by law to provide to them. In cases across the country, including at least one in California challenging the rules for public school teachers (Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Assn.), lawyers are now asking courts to extend the rule of Harris to all public employees and to prohibit government employers from requiring employees to pay their fair share of union representation. Requiring unions to offer free representation to workers who do not want a union makes no sense.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. Last week Google created an advisory committee to help it implement the “right to be forgotten” online that has been demanded by the European Court of Justice. It has its work cut out: the search giant has received more than 70,000 requests since May to decouple a claimant’s name from search results that may be true but are deemed “irrelevant” and presumably reputation-damaging. Turning theory into practice has revealed unanswered questions – and some outright flaws – in the court’s decision.